New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry: Are Robots Replacing Skilled Workers?

We're in that very awkward time similar to the start of the industrial revolution when machines were adopted by factories that could do the job of several workers...

If you embrace the robots, you'll have an initial surge in unemployment as they people they replace will have to retrain and find new lines of employment. However, if you don't embrace it, you know for a fact other countries will, giving them an economic advantage and potentially causing an increase in unemployment as some of your businesses can't compete.

Maybe looking to how Britain and the world coped with that first industrialisation will give us a clue as to the best course of action with this new one.

that sad, its a shame

So how do you get back to nearly full employment (5% or so) when you have huge pools of cheap labor around the world and robots have become more sophisticated than ever before?

Is it possible in this day and age?

Will we all be working in the service sector?

Whats absurd is that we live in an economic system where the ability to produce more stuff more efficiently can be a bad thing.

I think that we are still in the stage where robots are replacing mostly semi-skilled workers. Their increasing reliability and better programming is increasing their autonomy and technological advances which enable them to assist in troubleshooting themselves will certainly reduce the need for maintenance. Falling prices are increasing the number of applications which they are cost effective.

many unskilled workers too

No, they break-down instead and it takes a week or two for a tech to show up and he/she has to work all day fixing it--go grocery shopping where they have the automatic checkouts frequently and you'll see it. And think about it: we're in a consumer spending economy, how much consuming does the robot do? If you want to help kill the economy, use more robots.

Obviously they are.

Robots won't make a big dent until they decide to join the UAW.

No robot unions yet, no minimum wage, no vacations 24 hour work days do the math.

Just wait till their jobs get outsourced to some junk yard in Mumbai.

This article & poll are sooooooo 1980's!!!!!!!! lol

It’s a smart move; robots do not call in sick, go on strike, come to work hung over, take lunch breaks, get 2-4 weeks of paid vacation per year, get disability, retire at 100% pay, and qualify for FMLA.

But the techs. do! :p lol

Next thing you know, we end up lazy and gluttonous and we start to abuse the technology of robots and then instead of nuclear warfare, we start to hear about technological warfare. All in all, I smell free labor and employers not wanting to pay their employees.

But this still requires a host of skilled programmers and set-up people to utilize the robots and modern machine tools.

The time is coming for the 5 day weekend folks. All you Neanderthals better like it or get in the WAY BACK MACHINE!

Hello! Its 2012! Its about time!

Money will be obsolete! What a concept for conservatives to deal with! Good thing they will be gone with the RAPTURE!

Gee power and money seem to be one thing that is bi partisan :)

Unless we are heading for a futuristic dystopia where government is useless before the political might of a rent extracting Financial services industry.

All hail the newly privatized United States of America. o.0??

Although they speed up the production process and allow us to advance, robots have taken away jobs. Now, robots haven't taken away the best jobs, but they've taken away the jobs that people who didn't go to college could get.

Adam Smith's theory of economics, aka, capitalism, suggests that in an efficient market, the price of goods and services will equal their costs.. The German School of Economics suggest in the long term costs are equal to the labor content. The American School of Economics suggest the government's role is to assure efficient markets.

So robots may reduce the labor content of goods and services and thus lower the price of those goods and services. ... but they won't replace workers because without workers earning a living to buy those goods and services, there is no market and what those robots produce has no value without a market.

There is little place left for unskilled workers and skilled are being chewed away...

In 1958, I was in school practicing typing. The script was an article about automation taking over jobs. It was scary but I didn't know why this was expected. I didn't see anything being automated. I mean here I was on sluggish manual typewriter pecking my fingers to the bone! Slowly the meaning of that article became clear as I watched people lose jobs and the face of business became a mask.

Don't laugh kids...........this IS what I learned to type on!

it's the same paradigm shift that we experienced when we went from 95% agricultural to 5% .

we'll produce as much as we've ever produced, probably more, but we'll need fewer people to do it.

That is a fair analogy...we went from the agricultural age to the industrial age ... and now the "information age". In the agricultural age, land was wealth; in the industrial age, capital as wealth; and in the information age, knowledge is wealth.

Some want to suggest in the "Information Age" we have "intellectual capital". They then try to identify "intellectual capital" as patents and other written material which can be owned in a traditional sense. These are missing the revolution....because you may pay $50 for a book...perhaps $100 if it is a really good book....but you will pay $100/hour or more for the author of the book to speak with you. Indeed intellectual capital may include the white matter, i.e., written material, but the valuable part of intellectual capital is the grey matter that sits between the ears of the knowledge worker who wrote and/or read the book and can apply its contents to your problem.

it's Alvin Toffler's 'Third Wave', only its probably the fifth or sixth wave...

our cheese is being moved. pining for where the easy to find cheese used to be is a waste of time...

And that is why the conflict for the "soul of America" is so intense these last few years. We have a large number of people who wish to return this nation to the industrial age when ownership rather than knowledge was the foundation for the economy.

there's no way to go back, short of sabotaging automation.

i don't think that our 'soul' is tied to industry like that. we left the farm and now its typically a hobby. maybe manufacturing will go that way too.

the people that can't look forward will be left behind. they'll self marginalize...

I know...but the general population has not yet grasped the change. Think about the difference between the two political parties on issues like evolution, climate change, economic theory, federal role in education. ... Next look at where these parties gain their support, e.g., university towns vs. farm towns; Intellectual capital centers like NYC and Hollywood vs. rural states like Iowa and Mississippi. Think about the basic messaging hope vs. fear.

Now do you see the struggle for the "soul of America". ... although there is no going back, we could get stopped in our tracks. If we do, the change will still happen. I was just in India and they are committed to educating the next generation. Baliwood is producing as many if not more movies than Hollywood. And their software engineers are rapidly gaining proficiency. A few years ago I visited China. They are similarly poised to capture the upper hand where ever America wishes to abandon it .... although their capability is much more about logistics vs. a vs. the US since they have limited skills in English.

truly. pitting hope against fear... good point.

hmmm... today's WSJ pointed out that India is very successful producing scientists and engineers, but still don't have the infrastructure to absorb them. pretty similar to the USSR having physicists driving cabs because there wasn't any work for them. China may not have hit that wall yet.

i think that you're right, but neither country can ramp up to compete head to head for a generation. or two. their big advantage is unskilled labor, doing simple things. while they might have pockets of high competence, its what they do with it. China has something like 200 million unemployed. dealing with that sort of problem, alone, will be daunting. they need a smoothly functioning export business to generate wealth IN China to grow the entire country.

There is not doubt that America has tremendous advantages over both China and India. But never forget "virtue is not hereditary...neither is it perpetual..." (Thomas Paine from Common Sense).

And I believe the gap between India, China, and the US is a generation to a generation and a half. Clearly they do not have a sufficient number of "mature wise folks" like myself which is why I have been to both India and China. What they do have in abundance is bright, ambitious young folks with excellent educations who will become "mature wise folks" in 20 years. The progress in these areas during my career has been phenomenal....why when I started nobody sent senior staff to India or China...instead we sent junior staff. Today, they have the junior staff in such abundance that it makes more sense to send the senior staff to them rather than bring the junior staff here...and senior staff don't travel cheap...just my wine cost about $50/day. For me that was one shocker...wine in India is expensive...and I was traveling with an associate who shares my passion...just to put it into context, a wine we could buy retail for 20/bottle...in a restaurant for 40/bottle...cost 80-100/bottle in India at the restaurant.

good quote. i wouldn't expect us to sit on our laurels. there are too many Americans that are driven by the need for success.

at some point, the shear population numbers will grind their growth to a stop. the rapid growth they see now can't be sustained. its likely they'll both settle into a two class 'have and have not' society.

this growth is the low hanging fruit. they are both in for some real problems.

wine cost is just one of them...

Change in GNP is change in workforce times change in productivity. Countries like India and China have massive populations surviving on subsistence agriculture. The technology to more than triple the productivity of this population already exists. All it requires is the capital and political will to exploit. India and China have the political will and they are rapidly acquiring the capital.

Since I do not speak Chinese, I could not read the newspapers while there. In India, however, the newspapers are published in English. Those papers make it quite clear that India is striving to create an egalitarian society. ... and I would bet on their success.

hm!

For decades, hence the reason this world is in such a mess.

It is a natural process BUT unlike the Utopia predicted in past generations, it has brought unemployment and a fiancial crisis. Training fo replaced workers should be a priority.

Money will be worthless. Put that in your 19th century pipe and smoke it.